Now, most Brummie Historians are familiar with William Hutton's seminal tome, but what of the man himself, and his incredibly articulate daughter Catherine?
William Hutton, the son of a wool-comber, was born in Derby on 30th September, 1723. At the age of five William began going to a school ran by Thomas Meat. After two years education he was sent to work at the local Silk Mill owned by Richard Porter. He later recalled:
"My days of play were now drawing to an end. The Silk Mill was proposed. I was accepted. There were three hundred persons employed in the mill, I was the youngest. I had now to rise at five every morning; submit to the cane whenever convenient to the master; be the constant companion of the most rude and vulgar of the human race."
Hutton admitted that in the winter period he struggled to get to work on time:
"In the Christmas holidays of 1731 snow was followed by a sharp frost. A thaw came on in the afternoon of the 27th, but in the night the ground was again caught by a frost, which glazed the streets. I did not awake, the next morning, till daylight seemed to appear. I rose in tears, for fear of punishment, and went to my father's bedside, to ask the time. He believed six; I darted out in agonies, and from the bottom of Full Street, to the top of Silk mill Lane, not 200 yards, I fell nine times! Observing no lights in the mill, I knew it was an early hour, and the reflection of the snow had deceived me. Returning, the town clock struck two."
William's mother died in childbirth in 1733. William disapproved of his father's drinking and at the age of fifteen he left Derby and found work with his uncle as a stocking-maker in Nottingham.
One day in 1741 a youth of 18 limped into Birmingham's Bull Ring. He had walked a good distance over the past few days - from Nottingham, where he was apprenticed to his uncle, a weaver. He had 'played the wag' from work to visit Nottingham Races, and his uncle's displeasure had been displayed so forcibly that he had run away. Now here he was in Birmingham, tired and friendless.
"I sat to rest," he was to write later,
"on the north side of the Old Cross, near Philip Street, the poorest of the poor belonging to that great parish of which, 27 years after, I should be Overseer." Two men in aprons stood him a pint with bread and cheese at 'The Bell' in Philip Street before finding him a night's lodging for three-halfpence.
The young man was William Hutton, who was to fill other important posts in Birmingham in addition to being an Overseer, but who is best remembered as a local historian.
On his first runaway visit young William stayed in Birmingham only a few days, but long enough to say of the inhabitants:
"They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld .... I saw men awake: their very step along the street shewed alacrity. Hospitality seemed to claim this happy people for her own."
William was a keen reader and in 1846 began collecting books. Three years later he decided to open his own bookshop in Southwell. The shop was successful and by 1751 he moved to a larger shop in the nearby city of Birmingham, setting up as a bookseller in High Street on the site of the old Tolbooth, or Leather Hall, at £8 a year rent. His premises comprised a 'half-shop' with a modest stock of second-hand volumes, but at once, in 1751, he opened the first circulating library in Birmingham, and in 1756 the first paper warehouse. He later wrote of another innovation:
"I was also the first to introduce the barrow with two wheels; there are now more than 100”
The young bookseller quickly established himself in the town of his adoption. Married to Sarah Cock on 23rd June 1755, in St. Philip's Church, which-unlike many of us today-he thought "the credit of the place", he had a daughter, Catherine, in 1756, and a son, Thomas, a year later.
His house called Garland House on High Street, where Waterstone's is now, was bought in 1772, but he rebuilt a new one there in 1775.
When a Court of Requests was set up in Birmingham for the recovery of debts under £2, Hutton was one of seventy-two commissioners appointed, and he delivered his judgements from the chamber over the Old Cross near where he once sat as a penniless wanderer. Local politics in Birmingham in the 1760s was concerned with the Lamp Act, passed ultimately on 21st April 1769. This aimed at improving anti-social conditions in the town brought about by private development. As Hutton wrote in 1765:
"When land is appropriated for a street the builders are under no control . . . hence arise evils without a cure, such as narrowness which scarcely admits light." Yet when two of his houses which formed a gateway to New Street were endangered by the Bill, Hutton, in an outburst of blatant self-interest, opposed it.
He was now feeling the urge of all successful men-to build a home out of town. On his frequent visits to Derby and Nottingham he passed through Saltley and was always impressed by a half-acre of land known as Bennetts Hill on the road to Washwood Heath. In 1769 he bought it; building began at once, and Hutton observed with surprise that the workman cutting the first turf "engaged in prayer" before doing so. Red Hill House, as Hutton called his new home, was completed and occupied before 1769 ended. The house stood on the left of Washwood Heath Road leaving Birmingham, and his son was to build a house opposite known as Bennetts Hill House.
Today Bennetts Road, Hutton Road, and Hutton Street are reminders in the area of the connection, while Herrick Road recalls a Councillor Herrick who acquired Bennetts Hill House from the Huttons around 1900 and lived there until it was demolished in the I930s. At Red Hill House there were effigies of Hammond and Pitmore, hanged in 1781 at Washwood Heath for murder and highway robbery. Hanging continued there until 1832, and on 19th April 1802 a crowd of 10,000 gathered to watch the execution of eight prisoners for forgery, sheep-stealing, and burglary. In 1825 Hutton's daughter, Catherine, herself the authoress of three novels, addressed a letter from "Bennetts Hill, near Birmingham", and wrote: "I say 'near' because an upstart of a street has arisen in Birmingham which has assumed the name of Bennetts Hill. " Yet the vicinity of the street, in the city centre, had been known as Bennetts Hill for quite as long as the Saltley site".
While at Red Hill House Hutton tried his hand at farming. Buying a farm at Stechford, he visited it four or five times a week on foot for several hours' work before breakfast. He wrote:
"I have been in Yardley Field making hay when the clock struck nine in the evening and again the next morning when striking four:'
It was 1780 when Hutton set about his famous
History of Birmingham. His intentions to publish were made known on 31st January 1781, when he
"supped with a large company at the Bull and Gate. Rollason my printer was there."
Publication came on 22nd March 1782 of a volume containing nearly 300 pages, 24 plates, and some drawings which are the only representations remaining of buildings long since gone. In thirteen years the history went through three editions, and there have been others since.
https://ia600300.us.archive.org/17/items ... 3926-h.htm
William was elected a Fellow of the Antiquarian Society of Scotland. A picture of him around this time shows him in kneebreeches and a frock coat with a white waistcoat and white stockings, a balding man with silvery sideboards, his right hand balancing a book on a table, a spotted dog beside him, and a cornucopia and a beehive immediately behind him.
To be continued...